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posted by martyb on Tuesday January 22 2019, @01:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the build-it-and-they-will-come^W-go dept.

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Aerospace startup making 3D-printed rockets now has a launch site at America’s busiest spaceport

America’s busiest spaceport in Cape Canaveral, Florida, is about to get a new tenant: a startup that shares SpaceX’s ambitious plans of turning humans into a multiplanetary species. The new occupant is LA-based launch provider Relativity Space, a company that wants to revolutionize how rockets are manufactured through the use of fully automated 3D printing. The company will soon have its very own launch site at the Cape for its future 3D-printed vehicles.

Thanks to a new deal with the US Air Force, Relativity will be taking over a site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station called LC-16. It’s a pad that was once used by the US military to launch Titan and Pershing ballistic missiles. But since the late 1980s, LC-16 has been dormant. The Air Force picked Relativity to move into the area after a very competitive bidding process, and the company will modify the pad to suit its rocket technology. “Getting the launch site agreement was a huge checkmark,” Tim Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Relativity Space, tells The Verge. “That was the final infrastructure piece we need to have a clear path toward launching.”

Over the last year, Relativity has quickly established itself as a serious player in the commercial space industry. The company, which was founded in 2016, has raised more than $45 million in funding. It also has multiple workspaces in Los Angeles, and it’s currently using facilities at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi to test the Aeon engine it’s been working on. As of now, Relativity has done 124 test fires of its rocket engine, in pursuit of launching the company’s first rocket by 2020.

[...] Relativity’s goal is to disrupt the entire process of manufacturing rockets. “For the last 60 years, the way rockets have been built hasn’t really changed,” says Ellis. Instead of relying on the traditional, complicated assembly line of machines and people sculpting and piecing together parts of a vehicle, Relativity wants to make building a rocket almost entirely automated. The trick? Using giant 3D printers that can create all of the parts needed to build a rocket — from the engines to the propellant tanks and structure.

[...] Building rockets this way is meant to serve two purposes for the company. First, it’s meant to save money by consolidating the parts needed for each vehicle. Ellis says that the 3D printer they’ve developed can make incredibly complicated parts in just one piece, and he argues Relativity will be able to produce rockets with 100 times fewer parts than normal. For instance, Relativity’s engine injector and chamber are made of just three 3D-printed parts; traditionally, such sections would require nearly 3,000 parts, says Ellis. “All the complexity is really in the software,” he says. “It’s really what the file and CAD model looks like. The 3D printer doesn’t really care how complex it is. It’s able to make shapes of almost any complexity.”

[...] Once it masters its automation process here on Earth, the company hopes to shrink its printers and ship them to Mars via rockets to see if they can create vehicles capable of launching from the Red Planet using raw metallic materials. If successful, Relativity could provide a service that both scientists and engineers have dreamed about for decades: a way to leave Mars once you get there. So far, we’ve only ever been able to land hardware on Mars, but not bring it back. Being able to launch from Mars would be useful for getting humans off the planet or even collecting samples of Martian rocks in order to return them to Earth for study. Ellis says that the company has already piqued the curiosity of NASA, which hopes to bring samples of Mars to Earth someday.

[...] In the end, though, Ellis hopes the success of Relativity serves as an inspiration for other companies to work on technologies needed for Mars. Perhaps other organizations might want to work on new remote energy generation or mining technologies that could be used on both our planet and the one next door. “I hope we inspire 12 or 100 companies to want to go to Mars and do the same mission,” says Ellis. “And then we all work on different parts of this. That’s really the vision to me.”


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  • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday January 22 2019, @03:07PM

    by richtopia (3160) on Tuesday January 22 2019, @03:07PM (#790086) Homepage Journal

    They won venture capitalist bingo! I'm sure there are people tripping over themselves with fistfuls of money to finance this startup.

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